You have contention there with consoles
Now wait a minute - if you notice you are comparing it to last gen. Which I happily reported on and have said multiple times that these consoles will change game design due to their CPUs, SSDs, and perhaps GPUs even as well. My point was, quite importantly, that both next gen consoles will do it in a manner that is very similar!
My whole talking about procedural vs. bespoke asset production was to counter the notion that it is wise to be constantly drawing unique assets from disk in an open world game. I never said "it is not something possible", rather that it goes against the trends in game development to keep costs, production and artist time down to make every single thing completely unique and therefore needing to swap out large portions of the RAM/VRAM constantly (and also using a lot of SSD Disk space as well).
I then mentioned examples of areas where I think swapping out a lot of the VRAM constantly for visual assets is appropriate (but also, still costly for disk space): I mentioned very detailed bake lighting as an example. Then
chris 1515 smartly mentioned alembic animations could also be one, although it remains to be seen what kind of alembic use case that would mean. Doom Eternal uses allembic in nearly every frame in some levels for the writhing hell stuff you see, on current gen consoles no less. But in another game a large open world... you would have to think about what that kind of allembic might be. And realistically. Trees and grass moving? Would you rather have that be an allembic animation that is essentiallly static in its patterns and movement? Or would you have it be a vertex colour animation which you could tie into procedural systems like wind and player interaction?
Maybe the distant water scapes? Same question about its interactivity.
Something else that is crazy? IDK
